Background & Research Paper

There are multiple perspectives on the nature of psychosis, its causes, and how it should be addressed. These differing views significantly influence the way the condition is treated. According to the American National Alliance on Mental Illness, as many as 3 in 100 people will have an episode at some point in their lives” (2024). These statistics highlight the prevalence of what is often a severe, lifelong, and life-altering condition. My inquiry focuses on the underlying philosophies that shape treatment approaches and how individuals experiencing psychosis are perceived and treated within our society. This issue lies in social work practice and, in my view, warrants extensive, open-minded, creative research – those that are alternative to contemporary practices. My questions revolve around the systemic tendency to marginalize these individuals and the critical importance of reclaiming their sense of subjectivity.

In an academic inquiry (via paper), I have examined, Le 388 in Québec - an outpatient clinic that provides an innovative model for the treatment of psychosis, including interventions that prioritize humanization and subjectivity over symptom suppression. The center is rooted in psychoanalysis, interpreting symptoms as meaningful expressions of psychic distress and underscores the importance of addressing the dynamic needs of individuals. Le 388’s successful departure from the conventional psychiatric institution shows the importance of alternative frameworks in mental health care. Despite this, after four decades in operation, Le 388 has been forced to close its doors in March 2025. The defunding of Le 388, reflects broader systemic barriers that privilege standardized protocols and pharmacological treatments over individualized, integrative care.

Unpublished research can be provided upon request (Literature review including Moncrief, R.D. Laing, Instituional Psychiatry and La Borde, Danielle Knafo, GIFRIC, and the founders of Le 388).

Personal Context

My interest in this topic is deeply personal. My sibling lives with schizophrenia and requires a high level of care—care that far exceeds what our family can provide. A decade ago, after watching him cycle through short-term behavioral and correctional facilities, I traveled across the United States in search of alternative, long-term residential treatment options for individuals with schizophrenia – options that I felt were more humane than what he had experienced in the mental health care system. Unfortunately, I found nothing adequate or affordable for someone from a lower-income background relying on Medicare. Now, ten years later, he is 35 years old and living on the dementia floor of a nursing home in Ohio—a short-term medical facility that is ill-equipped to meet his needs. He faces numerous challenges there, including minimal social interaction, lack of access to the outdoors, and the absence of mental health and psychological services. The only long-term mental health facilities available in the state are correctional institutions. I can’t help but connect his situation to the underlying perspectives on psychosis that our society and psychiatry hold. This has sparked a long-held interest of mine.

Project Details

The project is a visual-text booklet that weaves together interview dialogue and personal imagery into a poetic archive, offering an alternative way into this conversation. The textual source is the 2019 interview with the Lacanian founders of Le388 by Chris Vanderwees (Treating psychosis in Québec: A conversation with the founders of GIFRIC and the 388). Given the expertise at Le 388, I felt it best to present their work directly. Their interview has been disrupted visually and structurally, presenting only highlighted key statements from the text using a process of highlighting and erasure. The statements included present key perspectives at Le 388 on psychotic subjectivity and symptoms as meaningful information. Visually, I draw on footage from a 2014 journey I took with my brother across the country, searching for treatment facilities for psychosis. This was one of the longest and most intimate stretches of time we spent together, during a period when his life was shaped by institutions and short, fragmented visits. I filmed our travels, capturing our exchanges, glimpses of his world, and the essence of his humanity. Given my experience, this trip was front of my mind while reading this interview about the work and perspectives of the founders of Le 388. While reading, I wished I could go back in time 11 years. From the footage, I’ve extracted screenshots (fragments of visual memory) rendered into abstracted imagery. The images have been woven into the text – an attempt to merge time and space. There are cut-outs within the images that mirror the opposite text, revealing patterns. I wanted to represent the sensations of erasure, accounting for those disappeared by our systems as well as the recent loss of Le 388. Together, the reworked text and images form a digital booklet: a poetic, layered meditation on experience.

I created a visual booklet in response to my research, learning, and attention. I believe that a multi-leveled work can open a more intimate, human understanding – one that invites us to feel alongside, not just look in from afar. By merging research and artistic expression, this project becomes an act of inquiry and resistance, asking for the integration of new perspectives and a reconceptualization of care for those with psychosis.

At the heart of this work is an investigation into the dehumanizing frameworks that often shape psychiatric treatment and the lived realities of those experiencing psychosis. Inspired by art-based research, I see this project as a form of inquiry that moves beyond intellect into sensation and intuition, allowing for a multiplicity of perspectives and a knowledge that is felt, not just reasoned. My brother and I often communicate through non-verbal forms: gesture, pattern, symbol, and sound. Psychosis resists conventional language – it speaks in symbols, fractured syntax/language, silence, and with the body. This work tries to meet it – mirroring the language system of psychosis itself: layered, nonlinear, and symbolic. I believe empathy, especially the kind that emerges through embodied experience, is essential to rethinking these frameworks.

Project advised by Daniel Garner (Ph.D SW, Hunter College)
Research interview with Christopher Chamberlin (Lacanian Psychoanalyst, La 388, Group for Independent Formation)